2025 Minnesota Book Award Winners in Ebooks MN

The winners of the 2025 Minnesota Book Awards were announced at the annual ceremony on April 22 at the Ordway. Several of those titles can be accessed directly in Ebooks Minnesota.

Award for General Nonfiction
"The New Science of Social Change: A Modern Handbook for Activists" by Lisa Mueller
This book offers advice for activists on tactics to use to achieve greater success for their movements. The author draws on social science from the most successful campaigns to advise on cohesion, mobilization, message, and fundraising. It also contains tips from activists.

Award for Genre Fiction
"Where They Last Saw Her: a novel" by Marcie Rendon
Quill has lived on the Red Pine reservation in Minnesota her whole life, and she's unnerved when she hears a scream while out training for the Boson Marathon early one morning out in the woods. When she investigates, she finds tire tracks and a lone, beaded earring, and she quickly realizes another woman has been stolen. Quill believes a group of men working the pipeline construction just north of their homes is to blame, and she and her two best friends, Punk and Gaylyn, set out to uncover the perpetrator's identity. But soon Quill risks her life to put a stop to the violence and exploitation that's ravaging her community.

Award for Memoir and Creative Nonfiction
"Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother's Life" by Kao Kalia Yang
The Hmong author offers a memoir of her mother Tswb's life and immigration to the U.S. In Tswb's voice, the story tells of her childhood in war-torn Laos, her family's difficult life in the Laitian jungle trying to survive while avoiding attacks on the Hmong people, and how she met her husband and left her family behind to go with him to a Thau refugee camp. In 1987, they and their children immigrated to a housing project in Minnesota, where she struggled to get an education and provide for her children. It also tells of her return to Laos as an older woman to find the people she left behind.

Award for Middle Grade Literature
"The Diamond Explorer" by Kao Kalia Yang
Malcolm Yang is the youngest child of Hmong refugees, and he is over a decade younger than his next oldest sibling. He is much more than than the "quiet, slow Hmong boy," his white teachers see him as, and he is a gifted collector of his family's stories. Malcolm begins a journey toward becoming a shaman like his grandparents, as he slowly starts to make sense of his place in the world.

Award for Poetry
"Bluff: poems" by Danez Smith
A collection of over fifty poems by African American writer Danez Smith reflecting on police violence, being Black in America, and his home of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Young Adult Literature
"Where Wolves Don't Die" by Anton Treuer
Ezra Cloud hates living in Northeast Minneapolis, where his father is a professor of their language, Ojibwe, at a local college, and he desperately misses the rez at Nigigoonsiminikaaning First Nation. When Ezra gets into a fight with his bully, and the bully's house burns down that same night, Ezra is the main suspect. To protect him, his family sends him to run traplines with his grandfather in Canada, where he connects his family's history and people's culture.